A Dirge for Preston John, Page 26

  He would be king.

  Silent shock reverberated through the throng. So many mouths hanging open, so many hearts suddenly uncertain. Would the Abir steer us wrong? Was he such the son of luck that he would rule in his first lifetime?

  It was my name Fortunatus called next. In a daze I floated to the platform and spun the barrel, all joy sapped for me—I did not even notice it spin. My mind tripped and jangled—what sort of king would John be? I would not become a Christian, I would not. I reached through the dark door of the vessel and felt within, groping, the warm trickle of pebbles sliding over my hand. I chose one, and I swear it was a true Abir, I did not know, I only took a stone which seemed warm and big, no different than when I chose Astolfo, when I chose my scribe-life.

  I withdrew my hand. I knew, even without opening it. I cracked my fingers, and there lay a diamond, a deep red flaw within it like a drop of blood.

  I would have a husband. And I would be queen.

  And I remember it all at once, Astolfo bellowing from below the stage, storming forward, pointing at John, shaking, enraged, unable to speak to accuse him. And I remember Qaspiel, its face so sad I wanted to die there, just to make it stop.

  “I think he means to say: it’s not fair. I think he means to say: you cheated, John.”

  And I remember lying back on the altar that is a throne that was a sacrificial mound before the al-Qasr was the Basilica, lying back with John above me, and how in the morning the world would be changed and when we woke, the throneroom was full of roses and partridges and orthodox hymns, and peacocks lay sleeping in the rafters. Their blue heads like bruises: the pulse of their throats, the witness of their tails.

  “I did not cheat,” John said, and Astolfo whirled on me, his eyes blazing, pained, all the blame there: I left him, I left him and hadn’t I just wanted John all along.

  “No, that’s not how it was,” I said faintly.

  And I remember how John sat me on that ivory chair and knelt at my knees, the beauty that all supplicants possess sitting full and shining on his thick features. He closed his kiss over my navel-mouth and his tears were like new wax. “Say it,” he whispered.

  And I said his prayer. Rosa, rosae, rosae, rosam, rosā. Rex. Regis. Regi. Regem. Regē. Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus—

  “How could I have cheated?” I remember John saying, spreading his hands. “Only today did I discover how the Abir was conducted. It’s far too complicated to fix. And you, you mean to say Hagia cheated, too?”

  And that was when I knew he had.

  I remember that ivory chair in the night; it curls at its ends into arm-rests in the shape of ram’s horns, severed from the sea-goat when the first caravan settled in this endless valley, the first enclave of bird and monopod and gryphon and cricket and phoenix and collinara—and blemmye. And they camped on the beach-head and pulled from the sea with their silver spears a fatted kid, and ate the fat of its tail sizzling from the driftwood fire, and in time those first horns were affixed to the long chaise which became a sacrificial plank which became an altar which became a throne which became my pillow and it all happens at once as his weight pressed the small of my back against the cold ivory—

  “I don’t want it,” I said, and thrust the diamond out to Astolfo. “Take it,” I said, tears pricking my eyes. “Marry him yourself. Let me draw again. I don’t want it. I want to go back to my mother’s fields and stretch parchment over hoops and feel her tree of hands on my face. What will it say for this year? No, no, no.”

  And my mother, so young and lovely, stepped out of the crowd to put her hand, her real and warm hand, to me, to comfort, even though the rules did not quite permit it, the day of the Abir is liminal, and perhaps there is grace hidden there.

  “You cannot give away your fate, my girl. Nor your luck.”

  “Please,” John said later, and wept, for he had tried so hard not to, tried not to brush his palm against my eyelid, tried not to run his fingers across the teeth in my belly, tried not to glance at the soft place where my head is not. He had tried to resist his passion to come to that place when he lifted me onto the nacreous chair, and tried not to enter me like a postulant sliding his hands into the reliquary to grip the dry bone. Virginity confers strength, I remember he said when we all took our lessons with him and it was all a game. It is the pearl which purchases paradise.

  “I love you, my daughter,” Ctiste said, and her smile cut me. I had refused my fate—that salved all question of dishonesty. No one could imagine it, anyway. The Abir was the pillar of the world. No one would even conceive the idea of harming it, of making it cheap and false. Then, I did not even quite understand what Qaspiel meant by cheated. How could you cheat the Lottery? I only thought: Now that he is king, what will happen to us?

  Now, I understand. I know many wicked things, of which this was the first.

  Astolfo reached out for me, his miserable jaw working, his mute protest, his silent need. And I might have turned away right then from all that happened later, might have held him and said I was sorry until my throat tore and I could not speak either. But Hajji appeared by me, as if she had always been. She went to him, her little body standing between my sorrow and his rage. She pushed him backward, and he fell like a feather. The panoti climbed into his lap, wrapping her ears around him, and within her embrace I saw him shuddering with tears. Her grace stopped my heart, and I remembered too that night when we had spoken of Imtithal and how he had loved her when he was a boy.

  And I think of her closing Astolfo up and it happens together with the summer night when I led John to the edge of the stone river, the Physon, which possesses no water, only boulders, basalt churning against schist. The roar of it, rocks cracking and thundering, drowned out every sound. The priest sat upon his knees and I stood above him, so our faces could touch. I kissed him, I kissed him because he was my husband and my king and my body betrayed me with its want. I kissed him and took my favorite lapis-and-opal ring from my finger, the one my mother had given me, so long ago, in another life. I moved his hand as I would a child’s, digging the furrow by moonlight and the river’s din, placing the ring in the earth, covering it with moist, warm soil. This is my paradise, I said, bought so much dearer than pearls.

  The cheer went up in the Pavilion, uncertain at first, then stronger—the world must go on, we must have a king, and deceit was a foreigner here. Abibas the Mule-king was brought out by two young centaurs, hanging in his basket, having been uprooted for the occasion. He blessed us. I felt nothing. And when I think of the sound of the crowd I think of the sound of the river, the stone shattering there, and how I took him later, so much later, to show him the thing we had made: a sapling, whose stem was of silver, whose leaves curled deep and blue, lapis dark as eyes, veined in quartz flaws. Tiny fruits of white opal hung glittering from its slender branches, and the moon washed it in christening light. I stroked the jeweled tree, and showed him too my belly, and the other thing we had made—already swelling a little, already growing. He touched the place where my head is not, the soft and pulsing shadowy absence, the skin stretched and taut, and beneath our tree of blue stone he had spilled his seed into me—it seemed safer than to spill it into the ground.

  “Say it, John, say it,” I said, as the muscles of his neck strained in his cry, and I held his face in my hands, and his tears rolled over my knuckles, and I lay quietly under him, with the river deafening beyond. “Say it.”

  “I cheated,” he whispered, with our child between us. “I palmed the king’s chit—Fortunatus helped me. A Christian king, a priest who is also a king—God wanted me to do this.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “I did not fix your gem, only my own. But I prayed, I prayed like a white flame steaming—and God gave you to me.”

  It is night in Susa’s Shadow, and they are all gone, every one of them now, and I could have destroyed him. I could have broken his secret, and they would have eaten him and none of the rest
might have befallen us.

  That is my sin, and I beg forgiveness.

  There are three things that will beggar the heart and make it crawl—faith, hope, and love—and the cruelest of these is love.

  THE SCARLET NURSERY

  Near the sciopods’ forest (which they call the Foothold) there lies a broad plain, covered in a fine black powder. Each morning, the dawn strikes the earth like an arrow, and the most ornate flowers twist up out of the soil. Colored like molten glass, they coil and creep toward the light, and by noon have grown as tall as a man, each blossom with four large petals like lips open, fiery. Once the noon-moment has passed, they begin to slump and shrivel, and by night have crawled back into the earth to dream, and in the morning will come up again. This repeats, over and over, forever. All my life I was warned not to eat the flowers, that they are fey and unwholesome. Thus, I have always wanted to eat one. I don’t need to eat flowers or fruits, but I can, and I am sometimes curious—what is it like to swallow something that way? To feel it’s weight inside you? But I am more or less at peace, having not done so.

  Nevertheless, once in a long while, when the children had some pressing lesson or were away visiting relatives, writing back to me about the color of plantain soup, and how the cameleopards are very difficult to ride, even for Houd, who could ride anything, I would walk out from Nural and not stop until I had reached the black field. I would watch the flowers come up and down in their mystifying cycle, and I would eat the sound of them falling. I would watch the flowers and think that this is the time I will be brave enough to pull off one of the thick glassy petals and taste it. But then I would recall how some cousin or aunt said that the addiction could never be broken, and no wine could compete for the dizzying of the head. Sometimes I wondered how they could know.

  One day, a day of my own, a day to myself, I watched the sun setting behind the drooping blossoms, their leaves grazing the black powder. And on that day a woman sat down next to me, quiet and beautiful, without a word. Did I know she followed me? Of course. I hear everything. But a queen ought to believe she can prowl so silently—it was not for me to belie her.

  Abir’s gargantuan hands closed gently over her bent knees as she settled into the greyish grass that bordered the field. They covered her body entirely, a shield of fingers.

  Abir, Who Was Older Than She Seems: I am grateful for what you have done for my children, Imtithal. They will be grown soon, and better for you, I think. Even Houd.

  I, Who Hurt With Love of Them: Do not think so badly of him. He cannot bear it, not really.

  Abir, Who Knew: I wanted to speak with you, far from the al-Qasr and the Nursery. I promised to tell you my story, and I believe the time has come—I am certain, for in a few weeks I will not be able to tell it any longer.

  I, Who Had Been Paid Enough: I wait. I am good at waiting.

  Abir, Whose Hair Was So Black, Whose Eyes Were the Color of Rich Gourds, Who Wore a Dress of a Black Deerskin and Three Jewels: Come, Imtithal. Sit in my lap as you did that day in Nimat. Let me be wrapped in your ears again.

  And I settled into her, and I wrapped her in the pale shroud of my body. I looked into her wide, exquisite face, her full lips and her savage eyes, and I tried to remember this moment forever. The flowers shrank down behind us, and she began to speak.

  Abir, Who Would Change the World: I was born in Nural. You have never seen the cametenna birth-hall—I know you have not, for we keep it to ourselves. The males are fragile when they are in heat. Their skin goes clear and delicate, like thin glass, and on the surface of that skin they project—oh, it is beyond beauty—a play of color and light, shapes like frost shivering over their elbows, their chests, but the frost glimmers like prisms, and the chosen greatmother must breathe deeply to control her desire. But in such a state, if a male were even to trip and fall, he would shatter. So when the time comes, they cloister, under rosy domes and draped tents, a luxurious place where the males eat and drink and play upon small jade flutes—for when the heat comes upon them they go mute, all their energy going to their skin, their seed.

  I suppose one day Houd will turn to glass, and go into the hall. I cannot begin to imagine him mute.

  It takes twelve males to impregnate a greatmother—the process is gentle, and complex, and takes a full year, after which we emerge gravid and birth follows some time later. We do not speak of it to outsiders. But I will tell you, Imtithal—the children call you Butterfly, don’t they? I will tell you, the pleasure of it is profound, and so too the great flooding of the heart.

  My mother was prolific—she produced six young. But I was the strongest, and the only female. She was a judge in the court of the queen at that time—an astomi called Cai, Kantilal’s grand-daughter. My mother’s judgment held sound and absolute in Pentexore—but she earned that, with her wisdom, her severity, and also her mercy. At the quarter-moon market she sat at an ivory podium and heard complaints. Cai loved her well; they were great friends, and drank the white lions’ beer together when each day’s work was done. I hardly knew the queen—Cai moved beyond my circle of brothers and teachers.

  I believe, if we are civilized and do not ask after the other’s age, that I am younger than you. But you lived in Nimat, among the panotii and the lions, and a peculiar peace has always held sway there. Here, in Nural, in Pentexore, when I was young—it was a vicious place. Two of my brothers killed each other over a racing debt; kings and queens changed like hands of cards. I saw more of this than most, because of my mother. She would bundle me in a long green swath of silk, and I heard her cases, too. Afterward, she would say: Abir, what would you have decided? And I would say: That bad man stole from the other one. The other one should get to steal anything he likes that belongs to the first man, which is a child’s idea of justice. Or she would say: Abir, would you steal, if your friend had more than you, and you envied her? And I would say: Yes, but I would not get caught. The Fountain made everyone certain they could do anything they liked; they had no fear of death, no shame. They had lived so long that life became boring, and more and more cruel pleasures were needed to make them feel alive. I recall one male pushed another cametenna against a wall while he was in estrus—the male shattered and died. After the mating season had passed, my mother demanded a reason. The male said: I wanted to see what it would look like.

  People have not changed since I was a girl, not really, but I felt the savage blood of Nural so keenly then, sitting with my mother at her podium, and it frightened me, when a blemmye-man looked at me lasciviously, that perhaps if my mother were not looking, he would take me, for I was not much less pretty then than I am now, and who would stop him? I was small and weak, I could not hurt back. I wanted to hurt back. I was no different.

  But children grow up, even when they are afraid. And I went to the Fountain, and my hair grew so long I braided it into ropes, and I watched, and learned. I watched the queen, I confess, more than I ought to have. I watched how she ascertained those who lied to her, those who meant ill, by smelling with her prodigious nose their sweat, their anxious, mean humors. She could even smell their dreams, their ambitions, and when she looked at me, when she breathed, she grew disturbed, and grave. But still I watched her, and wished I had a nose like that.

  I was chosen to be a greatmother early, because my mother had birthed so many, because my brothers had died that year, because I was strong and unmarried. I remember the nervous preparations—the baths and endless soaking, to prepare my skin and make it porous. I remember unbraiding my hair until it fell to the floor, and entering the hall, where I could choose males of my liking. And they were all so beautiful, the bold frost on their shoulders, their quiet hope and adoration. I chose, I fell among them, all twelve, and their kind eyes rejoiced, and more I shall not say of this, for it passes the bounds of decorum.

  You must understand, when a cametenna is pregnant, she possesses a strength hardly imaginable. All the vigor of her children yet to be and their dozen fathers moves in her, and if s
he is not careful her feet will rend the floor and her idlest gesture will shatter bones. This is why she cannot give birth in the hall. She would kill her mates, though she never meant to touch them. I carried my three offspring, that you know so well, not being so prolific as my mother. My head swam with the power my body concealed, and closeted with my mother, who knew all this well, I confessed that I had conceived not only young but a gnawing ambition: I wished to be queen. I wished to be safe, and make my children safe. I wished to play a very long game, at the end of which Pentexore would be utterly transformed. Was this myself or the voice of my gravid strength in me?

  My mother said: You know how these things are done. Cai owns a cleverness and wariness few could claim. And it is all uglier than you know.

  And in my mother’s reply I heard the necessity of it—for her child she would betray even her friend to death. I do not like that world.

  And so I did kill the queen before me. I have heard that you told my children this. I wish they did not know it—but there it is. It was not as hard as I expected. She smelled me coming, but pregnant I was too fast and strong, and I tore her limb from limb in the throneroom as easily as breaking a toy. Her guards watched—she had done the same to the king before her; they could not interfere. The release of the awful strength in my limbs made me shudder—I had held it in check so long. At the end of it her blood drenched me, and at the core of the wreckage of the queen I saw the drop of the Font her flesh clutched so dearly trickle out onto the floor and steam away. It was over. A silver vessel lay empty and waiting, in the hall. I interred her myself—it was only right.

  And I birthed my young, and worried that some other ambitious whelp would destroy me when my strength had ebbed, and so departed. I took up my palanquin and my elephants and traveled my country to discover a city where folk did not consider that living forever meant drowning in the worst cruelties they could fashion. Where despair was not the only law. And I found you.